Why organizations should bet big on neuro-inclusion

What are the benefits of investing in designing and implementing a neuro-inclusive culture? This article anticipates Neurodiversity Celebration Week, which runs from 18–24 March, by highlighting the financial and people benefits to an organization of prioritizing a single inclusion program: one inspired by neuro-inclusion.

Three key take-aways

1. The most diverse leadership teams generate 19% more revenue from innovation, and 9% higher operating profit, than the least diverse. The more dimensions, the better: the effect is cumulative. Small changes made a big difference: for example, bringing in 2% managers from a different industry would enable 1% increase in innovation revenue, and an even bigger increase in digital technology organizations.

2. The standard approach to inclusion programs seems to be to select a couple of diversity dimensions to focus on. A fragmented group of employee resource groups fill in the gaps, led by passionate people who compete for finite attention and resource, often becoming disillusioned and disengaged. This tells us that the headline programs don’t meet all employees’ needs and are, sadly and ironically, not inclusive.

3. The key components of organizations that benefit most from diverse leadership, such as open communications and fair employment practices, apply to everyone. The most effective inclusion program would target common ground between diversity dimensions. Implementing a skills- and outcome-based culture enables everyone to contribute more value to business success, regardless of their diversity interests and activity. This neuro-inclusion-inspired approach offers the best ‘bang for your buck’.

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Organizations that are active in inclusion tend to set up multiple, separate initiatives, each focusing on a different inclusion dimension. I have noticed this repeatedly and confirmed my observation informally with other inclusion subject-matter experts. Organizations typically start with a gender-inclusion program and an ethnicity-inclusion program; the best explanation that we can find for this is that the results are readily visible, and that progress is relatively easy to measure by standard demographic HR data. There is nothing wrong with these programs per se. The gender and ethnicity dimensions benefit a lot of employees, and organizations that invest resource in developing and running them should be applauded. However, this approach has some consequences which I don’t think are so positive: these inclusion programs are not inclusive, they don’t reflect reality, and they miss a trick in terms of building revenue.

Let’s start with the missed revenue-generating opportunity. This report from Boston Consulting Group [BCG] looked at correlations between business performance and leadership-diversity (definitions of what they measured are at the end of this article). They found that companies with above average leadership-diversity generated 45% revenue from innovation, compared to just 26% for those with below average leadership-diversity. Above-average diversity also correlated with 9% higher operating profit. Looking more closely at the impact of building diversity:

• These increases of 19% in innovation revenue and 9% operating profit correlated with all dimensions of diversity measured: age, career path, educational level, gender, industry background, and nationality.
• The beneficial effect of combining diversity dimensions is cumulative.
• Small changes make big differences. 1% extra innovation revenue can be achieved with small changes in manager composition: 1.5% of a different nationality; 2.0% from a different industry; 2.5% female; and 3.0% who have followed a different career path.
• In digital technology, the impact of these small changes on innovation revenue is even stronger.

A second undesired consequence of the two-program ethnicity- and gender-inclusion approach is that it is inherently not inclusive. I have observed that these organizations tend to have many other active employee resource groups or networks, which aim to raise awareness about other dimensions of diversity, such as age, disability, and sexuality; again, this checks out with other subject-matter experts. Large dimensions like disability are often fragmented into more focused groups such as mental health, neuro-divergence, physical conditions, and sensory conditions, and in international organizations an additional geographical aspect may emerge with the same dimension having distinct groups in different countries or regions. Experienced volunteers in these groups inevitably report that they have higher impact when they collaborate with each other, and want to collaborate structurally, but the differing maturities, personalities, and sensitivities of each group make it impossible for people doing this alongside their day job to retrospectively unite them.

A final undesired consequence of multiple separate diversity groups is a lack of relevance to many employee’s situations. Diversity is inter-sectional, and people typically identify with more than one dimension. Speaking for myself: I am a woman (gender); my son is autistic (neurodiversity); I was disabled for two years when my pelvis’ architecture decided to get creative during my second pregnancy, and my slow recovery is ongoing (disability); my children’s guardians are gay (sexuality); and I am British but living in The Netherlands (ethnicity). That’s five dimensions for a reasonably healthy white woman, and I haven’t even started on how I identify when I consider friends and extended family. People can feel that they need to choose between dimensions in a fragmented set up, and it doesn’t support them in managing the impacts on their work of their actual lived situation.

I am full of admiration for the people who run employee resource groups and networks, and am proud to have led one myself, and yet I suggest that organizations look beyond this worthy activity to these uncomfortable underlying messages:

• The diversity dimensions addressed by your strategic priorities are not enough. They don’t meet the needs of all employees. They are not inclusive of all team members.
• Fragmented diversity groups cannibalize each other in competing for the finite amount of attention and resource available in an organization. Employees active in these groups increasingly become frustrated, disillusioned, and disengaged from your business success.
• Your employees feel strongly enough about this to devote their own time, energy, and courage to improving their working environment. Perhaps their efforts can be deployed more effectively.

Let’s regroup.

How can your organization benefit from the opportunities of diversity while being kinder to every employee, which must surely be the vision of any organization-wide inclusion program? BCG reports that the companies with the highest innovation revenue have these enablers in place:

• Inclusion program is a strategic priority.
• Leadership visibly and consistently participates in the inclusion programs.
• Inclusion is actively empowered; recruiting diverse employees and expecting them to flourish without further support doesn’t work.
• Communication is open.
• The environment is psychologically safe.
• There are fair employment practices.

None of these enablers is exclusive to any one dimension of inclusion. They are universally beneficial. If an organization could identify one inclusion priority, that encompassed all of these elements, it would significantly improve the working environment for all employees while boosting innovation revenue and operating profit (and many other metrics too). Can we find this one inclusion program? Yes, I believe we can, by identifying and targeting common ground across all diversity dimensions.

Everyone that I have talked to, and especially those who feel disconnected from their organization’s culture and success, really just want to be engaged. Engaged employees feel seen as they are and appreciated for the value they contribute to the collective success. That’s it. That’s the common ground. We can achieve this by designing an organizational culture which judges everyone purely by their skills, and the outcomes that their skills bring to bear. In this organizational culture, an employee’s age, cognitive style, disability, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality don’t have any influence on how they are evaluated and appreciated. This approach helps all employees, whether or not they are a member of any diversity groups. There would be some additional specific actions needed in individual diversity dimensions, such as accommodations for physical and sensory disabilities, but properly implementing and sustaining a skills- and outcome-focused culture will get an organization most of the way to equality, the ultimate goal of any diversity and inclusion initiative.

I am describing a program that is inspired by being inclusive towards the 30% people who are neurodivergent, such as autistics and dyslexics, as well as those who are neurotypical. This is a neuro-inclusive culture: a true mix, that places equal value on diverse contributions, and actively seeks after and celebrating differences. Neuro-inclusive teams are consciously inclusive and actively find ways to allow each other to shine and contribute their best; they inevitably find unconventional solutions to problems, generate more and better ideas, are more successful in scanning and avoiding future roadblocks, and execute plans with greater success. I have written previously on how neuro-inclusion offers a short-cut to greater inclusion across all dimensions of diversity so that, as the BCG report demonstrated, organizations with teams like this outperform their peers by a mile.

If your organization wants to invest in one inclusion initiative as a strategic priority and is nervous of being either spread too thin across multiple programs focusing on all dimensions of diversity, or of having to choose one or two areas, then consider opting instead for a program inspired by neuro-inclusion. Neuro-inclusion targets common ground between all diversity dimensions, and results in an organizational culture in which every single employee can contribute more value.

The Boston Consulting Group report that I have referenced analyzed more than 1700 companies, of various sizes and in multiple industries, in Austria, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Switzerland, and the US. They measured:

• Diversity by a combination of age, career path, educational level, gender, industry background, and nationality. They focused on diversity in the organization’s leadership team.
• Innovation as a percentage of revenue from new products and services in last 3 years.
• Operating profit, or earnings before interest & tax (EBIT).